Crisi

Pabst is on the precipice here so it's as good an introduction as any. His next two would be among the great works of the era. At the same time I don't recommend that you seek him out on your first rounds of cinema, silent or otherwise. He's not lyrically emotive like Murnau, nor used to build on a grand scale like Lang. So it might seem like not much is going on after all and that he simply made melodramas with some flourish around women who suffer. Not quite so.

He was one of the most discerning eyes of his time, one of the most intuitively equipped in knowing how to sculpt - not just a story, adorned with visuals but - currents of air that come from a character's soul and carry the creation of that story as it fills the room. His work is full of corridors that spontaneously open places in the imagining. Were we to look for the continuation of his cinema, we would have to look for it in the films of someone like Resnais and even Antonioni.

Look what he does here. On the surface this is the simplest stuff, melodrama about a young woman stifled by thankless marriage. She would like them to go out with friends that night but he's too busy with work and just looks like a very morbid man. A friend asks, "why do you allow yourself to be imprisoned?".

Quick note before proceeding. A few years before, Pabst had made a film - Joyless Street - that captured the despondency of the Weimar era of black markets and hyperinflation, neorealist impulse before the language existed. Here he's unerringly modern, meaning about the life of private vexations that begin after more simple needs have been sated, the life of the dissatisfied mind that we find in Antonioni's time. The film takes place inside a spacious house, a fancy club.

Okay now to see what he does. We have the usual tribulations and ironies of melodrama throughout - she defies him, regrets it, defies again on until the lovingly ironic conclusion where they reconcile outside the court where moments earlier they had just finished divorcing.

But the real mastery - what sets him apart - lies in how the situations are stirred from the soul they stir and animate.

Feeling stifled in her marriage takes shape as a romantic escape with an ex boyfriend painter; he readily takes her back and they plot to leave for Vienna the same night. But her husband, in this oppressive perception of him, foils the plan, possibly paying off the man, and waits at the station to escort her back home to the melodrama.

That very same night she rebels and goes out to a club; it's a bit of a mystery how this happens, an acquaintance visits the house looking for her husband and she walks out the door with him. The point is that everything is presented in a fluid way, with scant intertitles and explanations and long stretches of the camera. You can see Pabst looking for a cinema that would be Antonioni's or even Cassavetes', something discovered in the wandering of how things overlap.

Inside the club, in this urge for enjoying life she laughs and drinks with people she barely knows. There's a long visual stretch of this with complex flow. A flirty banker hits on her friend, no doubt expecting sex, and moments later he's seen disappearing in a backroom with a mysterious girl he just handed money to. Asking about the girl, she's told that she's someone's widow. In a breathtaking touch, she finds the ex-boyfriend in the same club; irate at seeing him she begins dancing with strangers. There's no exchange between them, no "scene", only the furious glimpse of him perhaps as her mind conjures the resentment.

Back home while all of this plays out, the husband is alone in a room, possibly inhabiting what he imagines. More portents: she rushes back home to find him unconscious, as if stricken by what he has seen. Immediately after they fight and she falls unconscious, but now we see that he carries her to the bed and motions to someone who is vacuuming outside to be quiet. The point, lost on us because we began with the story at a certain point, coloring everything through her dissatisfaction, is that he's not just a lecherous villain, probably never was.

Pabst being on the precipice means that I get perhaps half of a great film but the first part that culminates here is fascinating. It's these notions, interleavened dreams of anxiety, that Pabst would extend in his two most famous works with Louise Brooks. See this, if only to prepare you for Diary of a Lost Girl.

The realization he permits is that all we see is filtered by perceptions that carry us into stories whose shape they take, that reality is fluid in this way, the constant playground of impulse.

Sure enough, Murnau gave rise to some marvelous cinema, others from the era. But for me the progenitor of all those who are truly worth knowing, one of them, is this man here.

Brigitte Helm glides draped in a variety of killer outfits through an escapist fantasy of love among the loaded, far from the gritty realism one usually expects from G.W.Pabst.

Introduced by her chic, worldly and bobbed-haired friend Hertha Von Walther into a world of swingers in which everyone is immaculately dressed and has limitless amounts of money to squander on sex, drugs and rock & roll, Helm herself throughout remains nobly aloof, like Giulietta Masina in 'Giulietta deli Spiriti'.

"Abwege", a film directed by Herr G. W. Pabst, demonstrates the most representative and important artistic merits of the oeuvre of this great German director during his silent period. Expressionism and Psychology are both intertwined without distinction in this film so we could say that the film is an Expressionistic film as well as a profound study of the psychology of the main characters, or a film about a marriage in crisis in which the troubled relationship of the couple is worked out in an oppressive setting.

In its visual aspects, "Abwege" is an astounding film with important and decisive cinematography by Herr Theodor Sparkuhl. The different settings that are showed in the film superbly illustrate the different moods suffered by its main characters. This is demonstrated in an astonishing early scene when Herr Thomas Beck ( Herr Gustav Diessl, perfect as the boring and upset husband ) is depressed, sitting on the sofa the in their bedroom in front of an open window waiting in vain for his wife, Dame Irene ( Dame Brigitte Helm, more feline and cold than ever ) The different way of lighting the apartments of the various characters or those wonderful and thrilling shadows in the stairs, are a good examples of the virtuosity of Herr Theodor.

Complicated, controversial and at the same time, successful, is the psychological study of the different personalities of that marriage, a couple in crisis characterized by continuous ups and downs, incomprehension, monotony, and lack of understanding. They are two very different people with different ways of living and they must take on the hard task of finding common ground, an effort that seems to doomed to fail. Herr Pabst falters at the end of the film when he resorts to an unconvincing happy ending as well as doing some unnecessary moralizing.

There is a part of "Abwege" that this German count especially loves and it is the one that happens in the Klub… can you imagine, this film gives the chance to watch a genuine, decadent German night-Klub of the Weimar era!!!... It's is a great present for decadent Teutonic aristocrats who in this way can remember the crazy nights of their youth, where many good times were spent in such gorgeous dens of iniquity. There the vicious and idle clients could find the vice of their choice: alcohol, drugs, tobacco and, the most terrible of all, Latin dancers!… And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must return urgently to the Klub.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

The years 1925 to 1931 were creatively rich for G.W.Pabst. The film under review comes between 'Loves of Jeanne Ney' and 'Pandora's Box'. Siegfried Kracauer maintained that this film would be of no account at all but for the nightclub scenes but I think in this he has judged it too harshly. Pabst does not waste any time on preliminaries as we are intrigued by and attracted to the main characters from the outset whilst the final reconciliation is beautifully understated. Technically the film is faultless. This is one of three films that Pabst edited himself and he has the services of Theodor Sparkuhl whose camerawork in the nightclub sequence is breathtaking. The images in this sequence are both intoxicating and erotic. A truly fascinating cast both on screen and off. Herta von Walther would eventually make a speedy exit to Brazil via Portugal rather than be a Gestapo agent whilst the eventful life of aristocratic Jack Trevor, including wrongful imprisonment for alleged collaboration, would make a film in itself. Gustav Diessl alas was taken far too early at only forty eight and the wondrous Brigitte Helm, greatly admired by Hitler, quit films in the mid 1930's never to return. Although this would generally be regarded as 'minor' Pabst it is wonderfully stylish and a further example of this director's mastery of the visual and his talent for getting the best from his actors.

Just before his two masterworks with Louise Brooks, Pabst directed this provocative study of an upper-class woman's sexual frustration. Neglected by her work-obsessed husband, Brigitte Helm falls in with a fast crowd of Berlin nightclub denizens (the "wrong turn" of the title), toying with an artist and a boxer as potential lovers. Pabst sketches this milieu in terms of consumption of cigarettes, liquor, and drugs, but it looks considerably more realistic than the garish cartoon decadence of CABARET and its imitators. A highlight of a lengthy nightclub sequence is some amusing play around the erotic impact of a backless evening gown. If Helm writhes with coiled intensity in almost every scene, she still creates a credible psychological portrait. While the plot devolves into a can-this-marriage-be-saved? formula, Pabst sustains interest through expert framing and shrewdly chosen gestures: thus, the act of dividing a pastry comes to represent the possibility of divorce. An intelligently adult resolution, offering no easy answers, adds to the film's stature.